This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Back in 2002, when I was graduating as a Journalist in Brazil, I had never heard of the acronym SEO, let alone ever being taught about how to apply Journalism in Search Engine Optimization. I don’t know if in Europe it was different, but in 2002 we were just burying the last typewriters in my country. I just wonder if the new generation of journalists leaving university are less oblivious about SEO than I was when graduated.

I work as SEO for an Online English School doing Link Building for their Brazilian website. They have an outsourced agency in Brazil with a team of journalists working with them as Public Relations. Recently, when I rang the agency to ask for the news releases and articles they have about our company, I realised perhaps journalists are still oblivious. The PR representative who spoke to me confirmed. “Yes, we have plenty of articles”, and after my next question she replied “Optimised for websites...? Keywords...? Hummm, no, we don’t do it here”.

So it seems the case that the company is sending articles to the media without being optimised with our keywords and thus we might be losing some good opportunities when they get published online. The articles she sent to me are, in my opinion, unattractive to Journalists. Lastly, how can she write interesting, fresh content about the company when she is so far from where the news happens, here in London?

So here are some ideas that could be implemented in the companies to get the website linked more often and by better websites and blogs, using PR jobs.

For Public Relations people working with or as SEO:

Find the news in your company

Google doesn’t like press-releases. Nor do I and I am pretty sure you don’t either. Articles advertising the company full of adjectives, like “the best” or “the biggest” are very unlikely to be published in respected websites. So, what to write about?

The big challenge is to find what is new. It could be something like a new CEO or a big manager being hired, for example. A note about the new company acquisition or an interview with this person could be interesting for career and work related websites. Is your company launching a new blog and getting into social media? In this case it could be news for technology and SEO websites. Online and offline media live for news, they will be thankful if you offer them some fresh, interesting content.

Create News

No news in the company? Well then you must create some, and no I am not telling you to make things up! You could promote events or surveys between customers and employees. You can also research into who is buying more of the company’s product: men or women, teenagers or adults? Any change in audience and sales? You will then have some statistics to get together and will be able to analyse possible patterns from them. The media world loves to know about market tendency.

Optimise your articles

Before writing an article you must have a list of the keywords. Try to insert, nicely and naturally, as many of them as possible - mainly adding them in the title and in the first paragraphs, but don’t overdo it. Check some tips about it here. Your job is not only about promoting the brand, but also promoting the company’s website for a Search Engine. To get a link in a good website is your goal.

For CEOs:

Give the PR people information and authority

Allow PR people to have access to information. In big companies it is not so easy. In the company I work at, the big decisions are taken in London. We also have marketing departments in Shanghai and Brazil. The PR person I spoke with works for an outsourced agency in Brazil and the information she gets has been filtered many times before it arrives to her. It’s up to them to decide what is news, so they should be amongst the first people to know.

Create an intranet

Give voice to all the employees in the company. One way would be the use of an intranet or Google Wave where people can share varied information about the market, the company, general news, weather, happy hours and so on. Everyone should be encouraged to participate. PR people could have a good source of news coming from employees and it would be a good way of improving your endomarketing.

Have a Media Section in your site

Add a Media Section in the company’s website. Feed it every day with press releases, videos, testimonials and articles - everything optimised with the keywords. It will be positive for the SEO and it could be a source for media journalists looking for news. Check this article about it.

Create a blog and get the PR people to participate

Create a company’s blog with interesting content for the public and get the experts to post there. In case of a design company, for example, the designers would be responsible for the posts with tips and ideas for the customers. Use the style seen in SEOMOZ blog, where each post has the picture and name of the author. Your employees will thus build their images as professionals and your website will get traffic.

A PR’s job here could be to contribute with posts about the company and the market, moderate comments and correct misspellings or grammatical problems from other employees. They could also promote the blog on bookmarking websites like Digg and Delicious.

CEO, SEO and PR people should work together for optimised news releases (CEOs can even do social media!). Team work is not only good for the sake of the company, but also the best way to get the website in a better ranking.

PS: From the first paragraph you can see that English is not my first language, so give a discount and be kind when you comment my first post ever in SEOMOZ. Obrigada!

If only more companies would realize just how many people they have in their organizations already that can help with the SEO.

Like you comment, PR people and CEO's are great resources for the companies SEO goals in that both can create great content for the web, both groups will be listened to by outsiders, and the CEO should be one of the most respected people in the company, at least publically.

A few more people that can be useful in your company are managers, if you have an office and a warehouse, for example, having those managers write as well on the blog or other system for generating new content can be a great way to both create well optimized content and keep people interested in what their company is doing online.

Here's an idea: beyond a certain point and beyond a certain size of site all SEO is PR.

Why do I say that? Because in some very competitive markets, when you've optimised a site as much as you possibly can, done all the organic link-building you can and seen rankings site resolutely below where you'd like them to be, PR is the only way to get wide-scale visibility, get a good influx of new links and raise visibility properly amongst your target market.

We have some clients who are all in favour of online PR and some who avoid it like the plague - I refer the skeptics to a project where we saw a tripling of traffic in the weeks after we sent out a major press release and a sustained increase in traffic to around double what came before. All from one release!

As an seo consultant I have served one of our customers very well. We have over dubbled the organic traffic and raised the conversions by 60% last year.
So my comntacy is happy and the CEO is happy.

A few months ago we launched a few new websites as a sideproject. And we needed some links.
My CEO contacted this CEO and after 3 minutes of talking on the phone we got 100 links from 100 domains. He controlls 130 domains through a national chain. All unike domains.
He wanted to include the tool we developed on every site and many on the front page.

I like your suggestion about using the blog as a way to establish company employees as real people online. I think not only would this would give people a human touch but also keep people motivated on the job.

Good point, Shareef. It's important for employees to feel that their knowledge and opinion are important for the company. If writting a blog doesn't keep them motivated, it will at least keep them sincronized with what's happening in their market.

A challenge for me at my company is to get newspapers interested in a) the content and b) putting our link on their site. We are an online retailer of truck accessories and it's hard to find good, original content specifically about our company to post anywhere. Most of our products aren't new; they're ones that we've been carrying for quite a while. So it's hard to find a compelling reason to write anything about a product. And most newspapers around here are stuck in the 90s when it comes to understanding the value and placement of a link. Any suggestions?

Firstly I'd like to say excellent post pvalbocino. By getting the whole company involved with the article content can also give the team leaders an insight into how the company is feeling that they wouldn't get with non passive surveys.

Secondly to Summer Sellers. To give you a little advice, you can turn the news into anything from your interests, or a general rant about something (like how the recent VAT or fuel price increase effects you) to interests of the employees. It is hard to write regular news about a small company, I know, so I tend to do blogs more on either hobby work or outside interests relavant to the industry (so I can still get some keywords in there), or things I have noticed that I personally believe I can improve, because even if most people disagree then provoking the discussion keeps a thread alive and is also great from an SEO point of view.

Finally you can just big yourself up that you are surviving the global recession and maybe put down plans for the future.

Eventually a local or even national news outlet might notice a previous post relavant to piece they are running, and approach you for interview or ask to include your piece on their site.

When I was living in Brazil I used to work as PR in a company that sells accessories and machines for the textile industry. It was not easy to “create news”, since the accessories were always the same and the company was small. Luckily, the owner of the company had a good knowledge about the textile market and I used to interview him a lot and get him to speak about the market, tendencies, “China’s invasion problem” and so on. I was not worried about link building at that time, but the local newspaper and specialized magazines published some of those interviews and started looking for my boss as source of market information.

We also got our technician to give some tips about how to preserve the machine using the accessories correctly.

Hope we could help you, Summer Sellers. Thank you both for your comments!